New Film 'Bombshell - the Hedy Lamarr Story'

[David G4EBT]

I thought this new film might be of interest to some on the forum, as it is to me.

In her day, Hedy Lamarr was seen by most as nothing more than a glamorous 'femme fatale' film star - a six times married blonde bombshell with a complex not so private life. Few knew or cared that beyond that image, she had another side to her as a brilliant scientist who devised and patented frequency agile spread spectrum communications, still very relevant today (Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS etc).

On 8 March at 6.30pm to celebrate International Women’s Day a new documentary film ‘Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story’ is being screened as a live event at selected cinemas accross the UK, followed by satellite Q&A with Executive Producer Susan Sarandon and Director Alexandra Dean. This documentary film is on general release in the UK from 9 March 2018.

During World War II, Lamarr learned that radio-controlled torpedoes, which were important in the naval war, could easily be jammed, thereby causing the torpedo to go off course. With the knowledge she had gained about torpedoes from her first husband, she thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized player-piano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented.

Their invention was granted a patent on August 11, 1942. However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military.

In 1962 (at the time of the Cuban missile crisis), an updated version of their design at last appeared on Navy ships. Lamarr and Antheil's work with spread spectrum technology led to the development of GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi.

In 1997, they received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. Lamarr was featured on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

A bit more about Lamarr and the film at these links:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...dy-Lamarr.html

https://www.npr.org/2017/12/03/56763...ar-hedy-lamarr

Hope that's of interest.

[The Philpott]

Thanks for that David, i may go and see it. Goes to show some of the best ideas are the simplest ones.. I believe they spent a lot of effort ensuring that the scroll in the weapon moved at the same rate as the one on the command vessel. I can't help wondering if some overlap/duplication was involved, on the same theory as the systems that (supposedly) stop CD players in vehicles from skipping.

A better title might have been 'Hedy Lamarr and the Torpedoes', but that would have attracted interest from punk fans..

[McMurdo]

Her torpedo work was covered in one of the PBS-America war weapons episodes recently, I forget the name of the episode but they're repeated regularly on freeview

[sortedradio]

I must confess I hadn't heard of her, but as the film is coming to Sheffield I shall try and go and see it. Thanks for the heads up David.

[M0FYA Andy]

Kevin, are you sure PBS-America is on Freeview? A pal of mine has Freesat, and tells me about episodes of PBS-America, but I've never found them on Freeview!
Andy

['LIVEWIRE?']

According to the listings in Radio Times (other TV Listings Magazines are available!) PBS America is on Freeview 94. This is a HD channel. Stations on Freeview HD Channels can only be received on HD TVs or by using a Freeview HD Box.

[M0FYA Andy]

That explains it, I'm using an early 'digibox' feeding a CRT television!

['LIVEWIRE?']

Likewise here, Andy. I'm thinking about getting a HD Freeview Box as an interim measure, as I'm reluctant to scrap a good working TV simply because it's 14 years old, but upgrading my viewing kit isn't priority #1 at this time! I only ever watch maybe 8 to 10 of the regular FV channels anyway!

[Station X]

Please be aware that not all Freeview transmitters carry channel 94.

[Radio Wrangler]

Hedley Lamarr? I keep seeing the thread as, but no, that's a different film.

David

[Scottart]

An interesting / journalistic 2 pager on her work today ( Feb 27 ) in the Arts section of the Times ! I understand that the movie will be available early March in cinemas and end April on DVD. Look forward to seeing it
S

[Craig Sawyers]

The 1941 US patent number is 2292387 . It is in the name of Hedy Kiesler Markey, since Hedy Lamarr was her stage name.

Attached

[emeritus]

On going through some of my unlabelled cassettes last week I came across one (probably made by my son when he was studying music) of part of a January 2004 Radio 3 broadcast of the "John Cage Uncaged" weekend, which starts part way through a piece by Hedy's co-inventor, George Antheil. I can't say I knew much about him other than his work "Ballet Mechanique" from which he had gained his technical experience in precise synchronization, but in the interval before the following piece, the continuity announcer had this to say about him.

"George Antheil was an extraordinary man. He wrote over 300 musical works in all major genres, including symphonies, chamber works, film music and operas. In many ways, both musical and technical, he was way ahead of his time. His concerts routinely caused riots all over Europe, which was then considered a sign of genius. Besides composing, Antheil was an excellent writer. He was an inventor and a student of many disciplines, including endocrinology, criminal justice, and military history, and, most extraordinary of all, he was co-holder of a remarkable patent with the actress Hedy Lamarr, for a secret communication system which is today in wide use and known as spread spectrum technology, although neither he nor Lamarr ever received a dime for it. There is a story there, but that is for another time. "

I first became aware of their invention in 1983 through articles in the IEEE Transactions on Communications [COM] that were circulated at work. These authoritative articles seldom get mentioned in the stuff that gets published these days, possibly because they are not available for free via the internet, but must be obtained from libraries on payment of a copying fee.

I don't think it is appropriate to say that their invention was ignored, at least not by anyone who was actually concerned with developing the technology, since it could imply that the persons doing the ignoring had been aware of what was being ignored. The evidence suggests otherwise.


It is significant that their invention was not amongst the numerous patents mentioned in "The Origins of Spread-Spectrum Communications" [Robert A Scholtz, Vol. COM-30, No. 5, May 1982, pp 822-854], an encyclopaedic article based on around three year's research in numerous archives and interviews with, and assistance of, over 100 people who had been involved in the technology.

The first mention was in two articles in a later issue [Vol. COM-31, No 1, January 1983].


One article "Notes On Spread Spectrum History" Robert A Scholtz", pp 82-84, explains that the patent came to light in the reissue proceedings of another spread-spectrum patent (Reissue patent application serial No. Re 299 469 of US Patent 4176316.) That patent had been filed in 1953, was kept secret, and was not issued until 1979.

The other article, "Further Notes and Anecdotes on Spread-Spectrum Origins", pp 85-97, was written by Robert Price, who had interviewed Hedy herself. She had allowed him access to the confidential file that was still held by the firm of Patent Attorneys who had drafted the patent.

Under provisions that are unique to US patent law, patents relating to military secret technology are held in suspended animation until their secrecy provisions are removed, are then published, and only then commence their 17 year term of protection. When this happens, it is prudent to check for the existence of any other declassified patents with conflicting rights that could affect the validity of yours, and amend yours if there are. In the USA, such amendment is via the "Reissue" procedure.

By the 1970's, declassification had allowed the US Patent Office to provide a term for spread spectrum technology in their patent indexing schedule (a sort of code book that allows documents to be retrieved by searching on codes rather than words), allowing searchers to readily retrieve relevant patents.

The patentees must have been very surprised by what they found. While Hedy's patent was by far the most relevant, the reissue's list of prior art goes back to 1924. Scholtz mentions that an exhaustive exercise had been undertaken by the US defence authorities in the 1950s to see what information about spread spectrum techniques was publicly available in the US Patent Office files. This had failed to turn up either Hedy's patent or several of the other documents cited in the Reissue proceedings.

Similar exercises by the Soviets and East Germany during the Cold War had also failed to find it, despite the fact that, being a published patent, copies of it would have been freely available on the shelves of their own countries' patent libraries under the international patent document exchange arrangements.

A factor could have been due to lack of consistent nomenclature in the absence of an indexing term: Price mentions that the prosecution file shows that Hedy's Patent Attorney had replaced their original references to "jam" by "block control".

Another patent, US 2495727, H.P. Hutchinson, filed Jan 7, 1943, issued Jan 31, 1950, which was based on a similar principle, had been made secret in the 1940's. It used the concept of synchronised frequency hopping for secure telephonic communication over wires, and would not have been suitable for radio control. It would no doubt have been taken seriously because it was filed by what would have been seen as a proper applicant, not by a couple of private individuals, one a notorious foreign actress (then known as "The Ecstasy Lady" for having appeared naked in a European film that would probably have been banned in the USA for its explicitness), the other a nutty composer.

Their invention was submitted to the National Inventors Council. Although according to Price, it would have been perfectly feasible to have used the teaching of the patent to construct a practical system with the technology available in the early 1940's, the NIC advised Hedy that she could best serve the war effort by using her star status to sell war bonds, which she did with great success. The NIC preferred to fund what must have seemed to them to have been more promising projects, such as the Frisbee made of plastic explosives (on which a 5 figure dollar sum was spent with no useful outcome). The fact that Hedy was technically an enemy alien of German nationality as a consequence of Austria's absorption into the Reich, didn't seem to bother the authorities in the way it would have done had she been in the UK.

By the time the patent had been re-discovered, it had long expired, and many years had been wasted by others in reinventing the wheel to get to the point Hedy and George had reached in the early 1940's. A great opportunity for technical advancement lost, not to mention the royalties that the inventors ought by rights to have benefitted from.

The PBS channel popped up recently. You need to rescan your Freeview box (or digital TV) to have it appear.

[Aerodyne]

Thanks for bringing this to our notice, David. I for one had absolutely no idea that this amazing woman was so brilliant. It is a film I will buy on DVD when (and if, I suppose) it becomes available.
We men often ignore the clever and creative women, who are so often - if we take the trouble to look - behind the famous names. I'm thinking here of Caroline Herschel, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jelka Delius... and, in modern times, the many female scientists and astronomers who lost out on recognition, fame and Nobel prize seemingly because of their gender.
This documentary surely is a timely reminder that there is often more to a person than simply the sum of their parts.

Tony

['LIVEWIRE?']

Members in the Oxford area may be interested to know that the film is being screened at the Phoenix in Walton Street at 6.30PM, and at the Curzon in Westgate at 6.15 PM, on March 8th. only

['LIVEWIRE?']

Having missed this film when it was first released, I went to see it tonight at our local Theatre. Didn't know much about Hedy Lamarr before, not even that she was Austrian by birth. Whilst I found the story of how she invented 'frequency jumping', which led to things such as GPS, Mobile Phones, etc., for which she only received belated recognition, and was seemingly never paid for her work, to me, the pace of the film seemed a little slow, probably because I don't often watch documentaries in the Cinema. Additionally, I'd like to have known more of the technical aspects of her invention, but obviously, like all such films, it had to cater for the non-technical viewers, who no doubt outnumbered those with the knowledge and interest to follow in-depth analysis.

[dave walsh]

There was a thread re this in February as the Film was premeired nationally in March. Quite a detailed one!

Dave

['LIVEWIRE?']

I realize that, Dave, and may look up the old thread, but thought I'd add my twopennyworth, having not seen the film until earlier this evening.

[dave walsh]

Ok but the thread is still open to add to if you choose. It gets a bit difficult when there are two sometimes that's all

Cheers,

Dave